"We really are heading towards an ice-free Arctic in the summer," said Andreas Münchow, a scientist at the University of Delaware who studies the Arctic. "It just takes a freak event eventually, in the next five or 10 or even 20 years. The next year there will be a huge Arctic cover, but it is all going to be thin on top, and the long-term trend is that the ice is disappearing in the summer in the Arctic."